#1366 Scott Schuman on what makes a successful blog

July 25, 2010

Blip Video

Scott Schuman (aka The Sartorialist) was interviewed at Pitti Uomo about what makes a successful blog. His answer, dramatically summarised, was original content, consistency and the ability to tell a story or convey a message through your work. Schuman takes his work very seriously and you can see why he ruffles feathers in the process. From the sound of the interview he’s against bloggers using other people’s photographs (which is generally acceptable in the blogosphere so long as a credit is given); he’s critical of young bloggers who sell out for fame; and he continually stresses the need for integrity and pure intentions. He’s single (and bloody) minded. But what successful person isn’t? More power to him for saying what he really thinks.

Quotes from the interview, below.On regular updates:“If you want a successful blog, you have to do it every day or almost every day, you have to keep people coming back.”

On telling a story through photographs:“It’s not quality of the picture, it’s not that they have to take a picture with a great big camera like this, look at Terry Richardson, world-famous photographer and he takes with a little shoot like this, but he communicates with those tiny images – what he captures in those images tells a story.”

On his own success:“People wonder why my blog because bigger than other people’s blogs. When I started mine that was not my goal – to become a known person, to become a celebrity – mine was to communicate and to share pictures with people of people that I took on the street that I thought looked really cool and looked different than what I was seeing in the magazines. If you’d asked me five years ago, ‘Where do you think this is going to go?’ I never would have said ‘I’ll be sitting in the front row at Dolce and Gabbana,’ because there were no successful blogs at that time.”

On the new crop of fashion bloggers: “The blogs now – potentially – I would say a high percentage of them are doing it because they want to create a profile, they want to sit in the front row, they want to be flown places, and you can tell that the heart’s not there. They start going after the traffic, they’re being manipulated by brands that want things, they’re being manipulated by stores… They want that validation… I don’t even think it’s naivete, they’re willing to do it, they’re willing to do whatever to get to Florence, they’re willing to get whatever to get there.”

On how he stays objective:“I was just in Barcelona, I did an event with a store but I had it written into the contract I was… not required to take any photographs while I was there, I was just there for the event to be there, meet people, talk, and if I took a photograph, great. That keeps the integrity of the site.”

On integrity:“You can’t tell people you have integrity, you just have to do it.”